Filogeografia mitocondrial

Heredity advance online publication 16 September 2009; doi: 10.1038/hdy.2009.122

Mitochondrial phylogeography

The worm in the fruit of the mitochondrial DNA tree

F Balloux1

1Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling, Imperial College Faculty of Medicine, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK

Correspondence: Dr F Balloux, E-mail: fballoux@imperial.ac.uk

Let us assume I gave a seminar. I would tell the audience about my latest results on the population history of the pigmy shrew. My findings would be based on a stretch of DNA comprising several metabolic genes, showing no signs of genetic recombination. Armed with sequences from a large number of individuals sampled over a broad geographical area, I would make some inference on the colonization routes and times. To make life easier, I would restrict my analysis to the mutations I liked best, with nice names having been given to related sequences, rather than relying on dull mathematical quantities. As I reach one of the key conclusions of the lecture, which would go as follows: ‘It is obvious from the distribution of haplotypes Amanda, Eugenie* and Hector_2a that the Outer Hebrides were colonised about 50,000 years ago, this was followed by considerable population fluctuations, a bottleneck during the last Ice Age, a swift recovery and a dramatic recent expansion over the last 200 years andy’. Imagine that, at that climactic stage I was interrupted by someone in the audience. The impertinent would say, ‘Sir, can I just ask you whether this confidence in your conclusions may not be misplaced; your analysis is based on a single genetic marker, which comprises genes with a central role in metabolism and is thus likely to have been affected by natural selection’. An awkward silence may ensue, as I would find it difficult to dismiss this criticism easily.

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